What’s In a Grade?

Musings on an overlooked aspect of education

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

There are certain aspects of education that we take almost entirely for granted. These are things that have been done the same way for generations, and so they’re interpreted as being baked into our system of schooling. Once they’re baked in, it’s hard to change them. After all, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

One example of this is the practice of grading. Grading is ubiquitous in schools beginning as early as Kindergarten. Students are assessed on the skills they are being taught and assigned a grade based on their performance. In the early years, at least for me, schools assign grades that are more akin to diagnostic screenings than traditional letter grades. Instead of receiving an A in Handwriting, for instance, Kindergarteners might receive an Excellent or Outstanding. Grading then morphs into the feared A-F scale, and it continues apace throughout schooling such that it’s often the one thing people really care about and remember from their days in school.

In theory, grading is quite simple. Grades are a rough measure of what a student knows. If a student only slightly understands a subject, he might get a C in the class. As he learns more material, he might increase his grade from a C to a B, and then, hopefully, into the promised land of A. A student’s grade in a given class is usually the result of a formula designed by the teacher that combines different types of assignments with different weights into a single number, at which point it’s translated into a letter. So a student who does well in class participation but poorly on tests receives a grade that’s different from one who does well in both.

Of course, in practice, it’s a bit more complex. Especially in schools where students behave poorly, teachers often use grades as a proxy for how well a student behaves. But this isn’t really fair to the student, since grades are supposed to measure what students know. And since teachers don’t want to be accused of lowering a student’s grade because of behavior, they often represent the poor behavior through the ever-nebulous “Participation” category.

In practice, then, what often happens is that the students with the highest grades are the ones who behave the best—or care enough to do the extra credit assignments. This doesn’t mean that these students don’t deserve good grades. Usually, the students who behave well are also the ones who work the hardest and know the most material. Still, the notion that some students get good grades simply for showing up (and yet haven’t mastered the material) shouldn’t sit well with anyone.

As with every issue these days, some people take their criticisms of grading too far. There are advocates and reformers in the education space who argue that schools should do away with grading entirely, and others who argue that tests are meaningless. Especially because differences in grading are pronounced between different racial groups, these advocates argue that testing and grading are somehow racist, and that they should therefore be done away with or somehow dismantled.

But getting rid of testing and grading won’t solve the biggest issue in American schooling today, which is that many students graduate high school without really knowing how to read, write, and do arithmetic.

The only way to ensure that more students actually learn the material is to accurately assess what they know and refuse to allow them to move on until they have demonstrated mastery in that subject.

Of course, the key word there is “accurately.” And as we’ve established, grades may not be the most accurate way of assessing whether students are ready to move from one grade to the next.

This puts us in a conundrum. Students are in school to learn. And yet, they often advance to the next grade without having learned what they were taught because they were well-behaved. Moreover, teachers are put in an awkward predicament, because they have to assign grades to their own students. I graded my well-behaved students better than my poorly-behaved ones because I was both grateful for their good behavior and desiring of their affection. I suspect that most teachers are similarly wired: bleeding hearts who are thankful for those few students who make their lives easier by showing up to class on time and completing their assignments, however mediocre the finished product.

As you might expect, this dynamic leads to rampant grade inflation. As with money, when the supply increases, the relative value decreases. In the grading example, if everyone gets an A, the meaning of A ceases to be “exceptional” or “outstanding.” As we’ve seen, lots of students get As simply because they aren’t total assholes to their teachers. But the material they’re supposedly learning isn’t getting any easier. Instead, the grading system that teachers use is more lenient. So students aren’t actually learning any more, despite their markedly higher grades. This sets these students up for disaster in college and in life, since they won’t be prepared to do the work they were allegedly prepared to do. (Although, college grade inflation—especially at Ivy League institutions—is similarly troubling these days.)

So what should we do about this? It’s not entirely clear to me. I think the best option would be to change our grading system from one of letters to one of assessment of mastery. But this is a lot harder to do in practice than in theory. For one thing, changing the letter grades to something more holistic would confuse parents. As I said earlier, grading is one of those things that has been around for generations. Grades, for all their flaws, are simple and straightforward. Switching to a different grading system will be hard for parents to adapt to, and many of them won’t take it well.

Second, this solution would also require a restructured school progression. Instead of students passing onto second grade after finishing first, a better system would be one in which students move onto higher-level subjects at the pace at which they master the lower-order ones. Students have different skills: some are better at math, others at reading. If math aficionados could advance to the next level of math but still needed some extra help on English, that could be arranged in this new system. But, as with switching the letter grades, parents would be a tough sell. Plus, it’s just easier to set up a system like the one we have, in which students advance at the same time regardless of their readiness to do so. School information systems—software that allows schools to group students into classes and that syncs with all the other software that schools use—would need to be overhauled for this to work.

Also, mastery-based learning depends upon students actually mastering the material before they move on. This means that, in order for mastery-based grading to work, students would need to be held back in that subject until they were truly ready to move on. Again, parents would likely revolt at the notion of their kid being held up while others moved on. Therefore, administrators and teachers would need to stand up to parental protests in order to ensure that the system is working as intended. I have little hope for this, as it’s hard to imagine administrators putting their foot down in this new system when they won’t do it in the current one.

Finally, there is something to be said for using grades as a measure of student behavior. Some of my students were motivated by grades, and they would at least attempt to behave better in order to not fail my class. And when parents won’t do the heavy lifting of ensuring their kids show up to school with respect, teachers need to have some sort of mechanism by which they can maintain some semblance of order (especially when feckless administrators won’t perform that duty). In theory, this new system would have better behavioral controls that were independent of student mastery.

Grading isn’t an intractable problem, but it’s also not one we can solve easily. In order to solve the problem, however, we need to recognize that it is one. When you stop to think about it, grading is far more interesting and perplexing than it seems.